The Irish Bride (34 page)

“
Aye, look at that,” Aidan
echoed. They moved closer, approaching the glen with the hushed
respect and awe saved for a graveyard.

Since they they’d walked away from
here that desolate winter of 1855, he’d nurtured the memory of how
this place had looked. Not the day that Michael Kirwan had come to
tear down his cottage, and paid with his life for the deed, but
before famine had moved like a dark cloud over Ireland. The memory
Aidan held bore a timeless sense of substance and belonging, a
frozen, evergreen moment when youth had been his, and trouble lay
on the far side of the future.

Now only rocks remained, in piles that
had once been cottages, and in the zigzagging walls that snaked
over the country’s valleys and meadows. Farther up the hillside, a
flock of plump sheep grazed peacefully on what had been Jack
McCready’s field.

“
It’s all gone, Aidan, the
houses—everything. And we waited so long to see it again.” He heard
the sense of loss in Farrell’s voice.

“
Aye. Nothing stays the
same, but somehow . . . somehow I thought this
would.” If he closed his eyes, it was easy to remember his da,
Sean, still alive, younger than Aidan himself was now, coming home
with a heavy sack of cut peat on his broad shoulders.

The rest of the family had scattered
over the years, to Dublin, to Boston, and New York, and Chicago.
But although some of the nieces and nephews had made it to America,
Aidan and Farrell had never seen any of them again. Oh, they had
talked about visiting in letters they sent back and forth, but time
passed, and one thing or another had gotten in the way.

While Farrell stood in the yard,
shading her eyes as she gazed across the deserted valley, he made
his way to the remains of his brother Tommy’s cottage. The square
of the foundation still stood, as did one wall, but grass grew on
the floor. The hearth, positioned in the center of the cottage as
tradition dictated, yet bore a few stones blackened by the eternal
turf fire that had burned there. Turning, he reached out and
beckoned her wordlessly. She joined him, and they stood side by
side.

“
This is where I took you to
wife, remember? God, but you were angry.”

Farrell looked up into Aidan’s eyes,
still dark blue, still intense. Lines framed their outer corners
and fanned toward his temples, but they gave his face more
character than it had had when he was a young man, handsome as he’d
been. “Oh yes, I was. I didn’t know if I could ever forgive you for
what you’d done.”

“
But you did,
céadsearc
—in time, for
which I am most grateful.” He fingered the thin, plain silver
wedding band on her finger, then lifted her hand to his lips. “Are
you sorry that you left Skibbereen?”

Farrell had yearned to visit
since the day she’d stood on the deck of the
Mary Fiona
and watched their homeland
grow smaller and smaller. She scanned the hills again, searching
for something that matched the image in her memory, and found
nothing. “I never thought we’d come back—it looks familiar but not
the way I remembered. It seems smaller,
somehow . . . I don’t know how to explain
it.

“
Go mbeannaí Dia
duit
,” Aidan murmured, as he had all those
years ago. May God bless you. Then to her, he said, “Come on,
Farrell. Let’s go home. Back to America.”

XXX